Books published by Aperture

The first monograph by sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer Shikeith, Notes towards Becoming a Spill brings together a series of striking studio portraits of Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.Shikeith describes the work as "leaning into the uncanny,” visualizing ritual and the process of excavating Black men's erotic potential, the better to exorcise the "intangible presences that haunt their bodies and psyches.” The men's faces and bodies glisten with sweat (and tears)—the manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as "an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a Queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy. Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous contribution of 7G Foundation.

Sales PointsA stellar group of critics and artists distills the wisdom of artist and educator Richard “Chip” Benson A rich, wide-ranging account of a unique and innovative figure who made a lasting impact on the medium of photographyFor everyone interested in the American lineages of photographic craft, community, and mentorship

Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective.Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star's lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist's singular vision.Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts

Sales PointsThe first major monograph by rising star Zora J Murff, recipient ofthe inaugural Next Step Award, a partnership between Apertureand Baxter St at the Camera Club of New YorkAn incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphaniesof a young Black artist working to make space for himself andhis communityA generous book, elegantly designed by WORK/PLAY, an interdisciplinarypartnership between artists and designers Kevin andDanielle McCoyOther titles by artist:OMAHA, by Zora J Murff. Kris Graves Projects, 2018, $300.00 USD Corrections, by Zora J Murff. Aint-Bad Editions, 2015, $40.00 USD

As We Rise presents an exciting compilation of photographs from African diasporic culture. With over one hundred works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States, South America, as well as throughout the African continent, this volume provides a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, "Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration--no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood--but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.? Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague's Wedge Collection in Toronto--a Black-owned collection dedicated to artists of African descent--As We Rise looks at the multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Artists such as Stan Douglas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Barkley L. Hendricks, Texas Isaiah, Liz Johnson Artur, Seydou Keïta, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, and Carrie Mae Weems, touch on themes of agency, beauty, joy, belonging, subjectivity, and self-representation. Writings by Isolde Brielmaier, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Mark Sealy, Teka Selman, and Deborah Willis among others provide insight and commentary on this monumental collection.

The San Quentin Project collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life inside one of America's oldest and largest prisons, demonstrating how this archive of the state is now being used to teach visual literacy and process the experience of incarceration.

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.  Volume 2 in this series, Analogy, Attunement, and Attention, addresses the complex relationships that the reproducible image creates with its viewers, their bodies, their minds, and their sense of the physical and metaphysical world. The selection addresses the image’s role in the social constitution of individual and collective identity, in social practices of resistance to the structural violences of racism, or in relation to state exercises of power. Of particular importance in this volume are questions of our changing relationship to space and to selfhood as mediated by the image and by the many networked technologies and norms built around it. Essays in the volume ask: what modes of attention are required of us as viewers and agents of image circulation? The question of how image technologies provide us with an array of freedoms is here combined with and read against the many ways images are deployed to reorient, repress, or reduce our field of vision—thus affecting our capacity to see and to act in social space. Contributions by

Sales PointsThe only book to explore this influential artist’s previously unseen photographic practice Barry McGee is an iconic leading figure in contemporary visual culture Essential for lovers of graffiti and street artAdditional CompsBeautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. 9781933045306, $39.95 USD (DAP Book, 2005) Barry McGee: T.H.R. 9788862080965, $49.95 USD (Damiani, 2010)Barry McGee. 9781935202851, $49.95 USD (DAP, 2012)Barry McGee. 9788862086165, $35.00 USD (Damiani, 2018)Kaws: Where the End Starts. 9780929865362, $55.00 USD (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2017)Wolfgang Tillmans: Abstract Pictures. 9783775740814, $50.00 USD (Hatje Cantz, 2015)Ed Templeton: Wayward Cognitions. 9780985361129, $45.00 USD (Um Yeah Arts, 2014)Margaret Kilgallen: That's Where the Beauty IS. 9780934324878, $49.95 USD (Aspen Art Museum, 2019)

This summer, Aperture presents a special issue focused on the relationship between photography, urbanism, and activist trajectories from Delhi. Guest edited by Rahaab Allana, the Alkazi Foundation's lead curator, the issue explores multiple incarnations of the city¿s photographic culture, from O. P. Sharmäs experimental works from the 1960s to Aditi Jain¿s intimate tableaux of Delhi¿s trans community today. Interviews with revered writer Arundhati Roy and with Bangladesh¿s best-known photojournalist, Shahidul Alam, illuminate sites of protest in the city and throughout South Asia. Skye Arundhati Thomas revisits Sheba Chhachhi¿s feminist staged portraits from the 1980s and ¿90s. Featuring a cross section of dynamic image-makers and thinkers, such as Jyoti Dhar, Sunil Gupta, Ishan Tankha, and Anshika Varma, and emerging voices Uzma Mohsin and Prarthna Singh, the issue is a distinctive meditation on regionalism, politics, and identity, through archival and contemporary photographic viewpoints.

Marking the one-year anniversary of New York¿s shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Aperture magazine¿s ¿New York¿ issue honors the city through photographs and essays by visionary artists and writers, from Roe Ethridge and Rosalind Fox Solomon to Hilton Als and Joseph O¿Neill. In ¿New York,¿ acclaimed photojournalist Philip Montgomery speaks with the New York Times Magazine¿s director of photography, Kathy Ryan, about covering the city¿s hospitals at the height of the pandemic. Irina Rozovsky contributes magisterial, sun-dappled visions of Brooklyn¿s Prospect Park landscape. Hua Hsu writes poignantly about the archival photographs that emerged after a fire at the Museum of Chinese in America. Antwaun Sargent speaks with the founders of See In Black, an initiative to support Black photographers and communities. And Tanisha C. Ford profiles Jamel Shabazz, whose indelible images of 1980s street culture are icons of style and joy. Our lives and our city have been transformed over the past year, yet this issue reminds us of how much there is to discover, and relish, when New York comes roaring back.

Sales PointsThe wisdom of one of the most influential photographers working today, in book form Teaches readers about using visual beauty to address social and environmental concerns A new title in the popular Aperture "workshop in a book" seriesAdditional Comp Titles Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation: The Aperture Workshop Series. 9781597112734, $29.95 USD (Aperture. 2016)Petrochemical America, by Richard Misrach. 9781597112772, $39.95 USD (Aperture, 2014)The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, by Richard Misrach. 9781597113274, $80.00 USD (Aperture, 2015)Destroy This Memory, by Richard Misrach. 9781597111638, $65.00 USD (Aperture 2010)

Deana Lawson is one of the most powerful photographers of her generation. Her subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe black identities, through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals.Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews highlighting critical dialogue between photographers, esteemed critics, curators, editors, and artists from 1985 to the present day. Emerging talent along with well-established photographers discuss their work openly and examine the future of the medium. Drawn primarily from Aperture magazine with selections from Aperture¿s booklist and online platform, Aperture Conversations celebrates the artist¿s voice, collaborations, and the photography community at large.

From Versailles to the home vegetable garden, from worlds imagined by artists to food production recorded by journalists, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden¿s rich history in photography and delights readers with spectacular photographs. An informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen and commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear broaden our understanding of photography and explore our unique relationship with nature through the garden. This is a sublime book bringing together some of history¿s most stunning photography.

Looking Again is designed to provide the reader with a glimpse into both the collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art and photography¿s complexity. Through 132 objects and essays, Russell Lord addresses long-held beliefs and offers new ways of thinking about, and looking at, photographs. As the world moves increasingly toward an image-dependent style of communication, this volume encourages the reader to seriously examine their belief in or apprehension toward the photographic image.